When tackling lead generation you want to make sure you go after companies that have similar traits to companies you are already doing successful business.  These would be some of the lower hanging fruit to go after.  The best way to identify these companies is first take a closer, methodical look at your existing customers.

Start by ranking your current customers using three criteria: gross revenue, profitability and “fit.”

The fitness ranking is more subjective than the gross revenue or the profitability ranking. It identifies the companies you know well, those whose business you are familiar with, those that are fun to work with, those you understand best, and those with which you have—or could have—a great working relationship:

What customers come up near the top of all three rankings?  Evaluate the other characteristics of the companies on this list. How large are they? Where are they located geographically? What are the titles or job functions of their decision makers? Analyze your answers to identify common traits, and use that information to find companies with similar traits.

Tags: Marketing, Sales methodology, Sales Techniques

It is not exactly hedging but adjusting your revenue based on past rep performance is a way to ensure you are not over or under stating your revenue targets too much. How this works is simple. You assign each rep a weight factor based on how they have forecasted in the past. Do they have a tendency to overstate and under deliver or understate and over deliver? Each rep likes to handle how they report their deals differently. So for example, a rep that usually is under their revenue forecast by 10% you would assign a factor of 90%. If a rep consistently is over their forecasted revenue you can assign 105% factor.

When running forecast reports you will want to see two columns for revenue. One is the stated forecast on the opportunity and the other column will show the adjusted based on the factor of the rep. To get the adjusted revenue numbers just multiply the revenue of the deal by the rep factor. This is easily done automatically for you when creating or updating your opportunity. It should be carried as an additional field on the opportunity for easy reporting. For companies that use sales forecasts for any type of capacity planning this will help get it much closer.

Remember the past is a window to the future. Always try to leverage the past to better predict your future business.

Rep Factor is part of their profile

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How it shows on the opportunity

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How it shows on forecast reports

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Tags: CRM Basics, crm productivity

When tracking an opportunity in CRM most systems allow you to track not only the sales cycle step but what your feeling is on closing the deal. This is very important and shouldn’t be overlooked. When looking at deals in a forecast, rating them by Gut is at least as important if not more as where you are in the sales step. Many times you can be early on in the sales cycle and the rep can get a good sense of the likelihood of winning the deal. Also if this is an existing customer with add-on business, you can have a large spread between sales step and gut.

Tracking Gut along with the sales cycle provides the team a really clear picture of the opportunity. It allows you to better balance resources and ensures you have the right strategies in place.

Forecast Report with Gut factor

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Tags: crm, CRM Basics

While dashboards are good to have, sales reps really just need a couple of basic views or reports to do their job well. My Pipeline and Opportunity Forecasts are the two most important ones. You should have a couple of different views of each one such as monthly, quarterly and yearly time frames and open vs. closed as well as opportunity and product forecasts.

CRM solutions will come with prepackaged reports which you should be able to modify for your needs. Reps and managers will have different ones of course. Managers should have the aggregate of their reps.

You also want to create simple negligent reports such as when my last contact and deal was with a customer. You should have the overall business you have done with them. This will help better gauge how much time you should be spending on the relationship. It shows if you are spending too much time on too little business.

So while dashboards are all the rage you can be just as effective without them with your standard, no-frill reports.

Examples:

My Pipeline – Sorted by probability of closing. You can also have a view by stage in the sales cycle

My Forecast – Sorted by months and probability of closing. You can also add quarterly if that is how you manage your deals.

Negligent Report – Sorted by revenue generated in a given timeframe and last actual contact (hopefully captured in an activity report you save)

Tags: CRM Basics

There is a new acronym you might not be familiar with in the world of customer satisfaction.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is about moving beyond traditional CRM, which for the most part is about automating customer touch points, and addressing a full end-to-end customer experience. CEM is about emotions. According to thought leader Colin Shaw you are trying to address two key questions: “What’s the experience you’re trying to deliver?” and “What emotions you’re trying to evoke.

To do this you need to go beyond conversation logs and call reports. You need to get more in the head of your customers. You need to know what is stressing them out. What is keeping them up at night? What challenges and obstacles they are facing?

I do believe that sales reps know a lot about their customers at a micro level. But we need to get a macro level understanding of the customer. Social media technology is paving the way for vendors to better understand, address and work with their customers on a more macro level. I plan to go into social media in a future blog.

But to address how you can start today working with your customers on a macro level here is a simple way to get started. Define a Business Objectives and Relationship Rules section on your Organizational profile. This is where you define things such as: customer’s business objectives; customer’s relationship expectations; and your objectives with the customer. This will allow you to chart a much broader strategy in helping your customer achieve their short and long term objectives. It is not just about your product line. It is about you caring and taking an active role in helping move your customer’s total agenda along wherever you can.

Supporting this within your CRM solution allows your entire team and company to always be aware of what everyone’s expectations are for the relationship and what everyone is looking to accomplish.

Below is a simple addition you can easily add into your CRM solution to start to track this information. It is just the beginning of a broader strategy and technology you might eventually consider to share ideas and issues, solve problems and co-design design new products and services with your customers.

Organization Profile Example

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Tags: crm, crm productivity

The demo has been done. Questions have been asked and answered. A proposal has been submitted. So why are we afraid to ask for the deal? Do we think that by asking it will sour the deal? Of course not. Prospects that have identified their need or pain and have a budget in mind are looking for reasons to do the deal with you. They look for reasons to qualify you in rather than out.

As sales people we need to be very careful of our time management. We can easily get caught up in chasing hope rather than substance. We feel that we need to be playing more defense because it feels less threatening and keeps the hope alive. But in reality it is a weak place to be. Games are won on offense. Playing a strong offense with customers builds a lot of credibility and makes the customer feel more secure. Of course it needs to be done sincerely and with a solid business case.

Remember a sales cycle should be driven as a continuous qualification of an opportunity. Each call and meeting is a constant test to see where this deal falls on your qualification meter thus allowing you to determine its priority in your pipeline. It also should tell you when it’s time to ask. A real prospect will never be upset when you ask for the deal. You will not always be the solution for them but they will not look to waste your time any more than is necessary for their vetting process.

Tags: crm, CRM Basics

A great consequence of reps using CRM is that forecasts will always be current (assuming you are using the opportunity mgt component). There is no more waiting for weekly or quarterly updates. As you are updating your deals, your forecasts are coming along for the ride. This not only allows you to have an accurate picture of your deals but also management and production people. It allows everyone to be proactive and in this economic climate that is critical. Waiting until after the fact could lead to missed opportunity, wasted money and people’s time. It also allows for much better planning by your production department so they don’t over produce products and have to incur inventory costs. Or not be prepared with products to meet a customer request. Analyzing pipelines and forecasts are easy when the data is being maintained by the reps. Everyone behind you will be in a much better place to do their job proactively and consistently to ensure a smooth and cost effective transition from sale to delivery.

In order to easily provide aggregates of territory, regions and corporate your CRM solution should allow you to setup a sales hierarchy. This is how the solution will automatically roil-up the numbers depending on your role. So Sales Managers will see the aggregate of their Reps under them; and Regional Managers will see the Sales Managers that report to them; and a VP of Sales will see their Regional Managers, etc…

You might also want to give your production or service delivery group access to parts of your pipeline. This will allow them to be prepared with the right production and delivery levels.

I included some samples below. The complexity and level of detail will vary.

Setting up your Sales Hierarchy

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Managers Pipeline

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Regional Pipeline

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Corporate Product Forecast

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Corporate Opportunity Forecast

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Tags: crm, CRM Basics, crm productivity

Your CRM solution is great for tracking leads. It allows you to do a few things. The first is it keeps all your unqualified leads and lists away from your good data. Never mix them into your opportunities or contacts until they are well qualified and you have determined they are worth closer tracking.

If you are buying lists, most CRM solutions will have utilities that easily import and map the data into your system. If no utility is available, get the list into Excel or a COL file. All solutions allow you to import that way as well.

The next thing is being able to easily track all you activities against it. It gets hard to remember conversations you have with so many leads. If you have a different group that qualifies your leads then you will really need for them to record their conversations. Make sure they have the ability to create activity reports so you can easily read up on what they discovered.

You also want to track the source of the lead. It is really important for whoever is qualifying the lead to ask the prospect how they heard about you. There should be a source field on the lead that the information can be recorded. This will be so important for identifying where you are getting the biggest bang for the buck with marketing. Once you have it well qualified, a good CRM solution allows you to click a button on the lead and convert it to an opportunity, an organization and contact. Most fields should be brought over when you convert a lead. If your solution does not automatically convert leads get the IT group to write some custom code to do it. This extra work will pay in dividends from a usability standpoint.

You should have simple reports that can track by source how many leads you got, the percentage that became an opportunity and percentage of ones that closed. This is so easy to do as long as you carry these fields in the entire process.

Whether you are tracking existing customer leads or bringing in cold lists, CRM is perfect for managing the entire effort. Getting IT to stream line the entry and conversion will really help with getting everyone to use it.

Sample Lead Form(click to enlarge)

Sample Conversion (click to enlarge)

Tags: crm, CRM Basics, Marketing

Once you have your organizations and contacts in the system you will want to easily track activities against them. This way you or one of your team members can easily see what is going on with an organization. Once you start using activities you will see how much time it saves you. You will not have to send time trying to remember past conversations or searching your in/out mail box for customer’s emails. Most CRM solutions allow you to align activities with an organization, contact, opportunity, lead or project. But there is a hierarchy you should always follow. Leads, opportunities and projects should always be aligned with a contact. Some solutions might allow you to go around that but you lose the ability to easily see everything going on for a specific account.

You should only implement a CRM solution that allows you to easily configure the different types of activities you want to use. The recommended minimum ones you should use are: Call, Meeting, and Email. Optional ones are: Appointments, Tasks, Fax, and Letter. Whether you use Outlook or Lotus Notes for your email and calendar your CRM solutions should be using the email platforms native forms. This means you should be scheduling meetings, calls or sending an email the way you would as if your CRM solutions didn’t exist. Good examples would be Relavis CRM on the Lotus Notes side and Dynamics CRM on the Outlook side. The forms are exactly what everyone is already using; making it super easy and the information gets tracked in CRM.

Below are some examples of basic activities that can give you an idea on what you should have/configure with your CRM solution.

This example shows a standard Meeting form in Lotus Notes. Notice the added section at the bottom that allows for easy alignment.

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This example shows a standard Meeting form in Dynamics CRM. Notice the ribbon at the top that shows Track in CRM and/or Set Regarding. Those buttons allow for easy alignment.

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This example shows a Call action item. The CRM section is fully expanded so you can see some of the fields some companies want to carry.

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Tags: crm, CRM Basics, crm productivity

I have to admit to using online dating sites in the past.  You write up a profile about yourself specifying your likes and dislikes, what your best features are, what turns you on and off and exactly what traits you want in a future mate.

I got to thinking that this is pretty close to how sales people prospect for new business.  You contact complete strangers and try to convince them that you have what they need.  You talk on the phone trying to say all the right things in order to get them to agree to a face-to-face meeting.  Just like internet dating.

Online daters and customers are disappointed most of the time, the proof being the small number of deals actually closed versus the high number of leads called on.  The answer lies in the details.  Online daters tell partial truths.  They specify their age based on what they believe will attract the most people.  They write too much or too little about themselves.  They go into excruciating detail of what they want, setting expectations that are impossible to meet.  They choose to post pictures that have no real resemblance to how they look today.  And they create a “false sense of intimacy”.  People think that spending a lot of time on the phone getting to know someone is the best way to make the first meeting more successful.  In reality, it does just the opposite.  It creates a false sense of intimacy leading to greater expectations that no one could ever live up to.

Selling successfully is about building relationships, but you need to be careful not to cross that intimacy line.  It will cloud your ability to remain vigilant and competitive.  You want to make sure not to exaggerate your product’s abilities.  And the best way to do that is to only present your solution in the context of their business requirements.   But, unlike online dating, where you are just courting one person (unless you are polyamorous), your deal usually involves a few people to court.   And finally you should be very clear on your proposal:  No old or fuzzy pictures.  What they are buying should be clearly laid out along with all the costs.  Breaking down the costs for each of the products and services allows your customer to pick and choose what works best for them given their budget constraints.

Most CRM solutions allow you to track personal information on your contacts, such as birthdays, sports, hobbies, and spouse and children’s names.  You should also be able to easily add your own fields to track additional information you find helpful.  It is very useful to keep this information up to date so you can build customer relationships that don’t seem superficial.  Most CRM solutions allow you to setup activities like reminders, emails, to do’s that will execute on a future date.  As an example, when you first enter a contact into the system you can setup any future activity like a birthday email or reminder that will automatically trigger on the date you specified.  It shows the prospects and customers that you are listening to them because you can remember the small details of their lives.  It is going the extra mile.  It is also important to use this information sparingly and not come across like you are best or old time friends.  But sending a quick happy birthday or an email about a sports team they like are good things to do.  Of course, this will also allow you to easily identify contacts who would be most interested in attending a golf or special event you may be planning. Wanting to be genuinely closer with your prospects and customers is not only good for business but makes it more enjoyable.

Tags: Add new tag, crm, Sales Techniques, sfa